‘Bout says it all…Not that Miranda rights had much impact on a large percentage of people anyway since most people don’t know enough to keep their mouths shut! Never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever ad infinitum speak to law enforcement except to identify yourself and then only if you are being detained! Know what your rights are and see to it that you make sure they are not infringed. It is not up to them. It is up to you! (E)

LibertarianGary Johnson: ‘this Independence Day feels different … Former Libertarian presidential hopeful Gary Johnson hopes you have a nice picnic, parade or BBQ to attend, and a flag to wave. But he is not delivering the typical feel-good Fourth of July message this year. “This Independence Day feels a little different,” he says. “The news in recent weeks about the IRS using its force against certain targeted groups has reminded us that, absent vigilance on our part, the government will abuse the power it has accumulated. Likewise, as we learn more about the massive surveillance being conducted by the NSA and the FBI, a lot of Americans are today thinking and talking about the 4th Amendment and its intended protections against unreasonable searches.” – Washington Times

Dominant Social Theme: We live in the best of all possible worlds.

Free-Market Analysis: But we don’t. We live in a world increasingly afflicted by determined globalism and wanton lawlessness, in part generated by regulatory democracy itself.

“The more laws, the more criminals,” the Japanese tell us. And the West has long since departed from the grounded reality of natural law and broadcasts the erroneous idea that law is the province of government. It is not.

Government can enforce natural law – those laws generated by instinct and human communality – but anything else merely invites circumvention. The more laws there are, the less observance there shall be.

People lament growing lawlessness, but when governments insist by whim and preference on passing thousands of laws annually and even more regulations, the result is the gradual erosion of civil society and the alienation of the middle class.

Here’s more:

Mr. Johnson continues, “These ‘revelations’ are bringing long-overdue attention to the liberties the Founding Fathers worked so hard and sacrificed so much to provide and protect. It is more than a little ironic that the Revolution was prompted, in part, by abusive tax policies and unreasonable searches – on the part of ‘tyrants’.”

He concludes, “Regardless of our plans for this Independence Day, I hope they include remembering that the battle for freedom never ends, and dedicating ourselves to restoring the liberty on which our great nation was founded. That is the most patriotic thing we can do on the Fourth, and in all the days that follow.”

Johnson apparently has a new organization to head called Our American Initiative, which is dedicated to the idea of shrinking government and defending Western civil freedoms.

We’re not so sanguine as Johnson that current trends can be reversed – at least not by using available, formal levers. But we are encouraged by Johnson’s observation that the recently observed US Independence Day “feels different.”

We would offer the observation that it feels different because we are living in the era of what we call the Internet Reformation. Of course, it is not easy to describe the Internet Reformation in a linear fashion.

But we have long predicted that the results would permeate society much as the results of commercial book-printing did after the invention of the Gutenberg press. While not portrayed as such, the invention of the press was probably the single most significant event of the past millennium – until the advent of the Internet itself.

History seems the collision of two forces: An elite that seeks to repress certain knowledge and a populace that, when exposed to that knowledge, tends to overthrow the elite in question, or at least vitiate its power. In the last centuries, technology provides the fulcrum that shifts the balance. When information technology is ascendant, freedom expands with its many human and social benefits. When it is not, repression and attendant ills are prevalent.

Ignorance is ever the friend of tyranny and eventually, even, genocide. But allow people to educate themselves and the world begins to change for the better. We are living through a very exciting time in which the knowledge of the ages has been rediscovered and is in the process of being reapplied by tens of millions.

There are, of course, negatives to this evolution – as we have seen with the expansion of the Surveillance State. But the negatives are not exclusive; the world is not merely one color. Tyranny and freedom usually coexist. There is no yin without yang, despite what pessimists and sophists maintain.

Conclusion: Mr. Johnson cannot quite put his finger on what’s going on today. But something is changing – and some of it for the better.

Yesterday, we learned that the NSA received all calling records from Verizon customers for a three-month period starting in April. That’s everything except the voice content: who called who, where they were, how long the call lasted — for millions of people, both Americans and foreigners. This “metadata” allows the government to track the movements of everyone during that period, and a build a detailed picture of who talks to whom. It’s exactly the same data the Justice Department collected about AP journalists.

The Guardian delivered this revelation after receiving a copy of a secret memo about this — presumably from a whistle-blower. We don’t know if the other phone companies handed data to the NSA too. We don’t know if this was a one-off demand or a continuously renewed demand; the order started a few days after the Boston bombers were captured by police.

We don’t know a lot about how the government spies on us, but we know some things. We know the FBI has issued tens of thousands of ultra-secret NationalSecurityLetters to collect all sorts of data on people — we believe on millions of people — and has been abusing them to spy on cloud-computer users. We know it can collect a wide array of personal data from the Internet without a warrant. We also know that the FBI hasbeenintercepting cell-phone data, all but voice content, for the past 20 years without a warrant, and can use the microphone on some powered-off cell phones as a room bug — presumably only with a warrant.

We know that the NSA has many domestic-surveillance and data-mining programs with codenames likeTrailblazer, Stellar Wind, andRagtime — deliberately using different codenames for similar programs to stymie oversight and conceal what’s really going on. We know that the NSA is building an enormous computerfacility in Utah to store all this data, as well as faster computer networks to process it all. We know the U.S. Cyber Command employs 4,000 people.

We know that the DHS is also collecting a massive amount of data on people, and that local police departments are running “fusion centers” to collect and analyze this data, and covering up its failures. This is all part of the militarization of the police.

Remember in 2003, when Congress defunded the decidedly creepy Total Information Awarenessprogram? It didn’t die; it just changed names and split into many smaller programs. We know that corporations are doing an enormousamount of spying on behalf of the government: all parts.

We know all of this not because the government is honest and forthcoming, but mostly through three backchannels — inadvertent hints or outright admissions by government officials in hearings and court cases, information gleaned from government documents received under FOIA, and government whistle-blowers.

There’s much more we don’t know, and often what we know is obsolete. We know quite a bit about the NSA’s ECHELON program from a 2000 European investigation, and about the DHS’s plans for Total Information Awareness from 2002, but much less about how these programs have evolved. We can make inferences about the NSA’s Utah facility based on the theoretical amount of data from various sources, the cost of computation, and the power requirements from the facility, but those are rough guesses at best. For a lot of this, we’re completely in the dark.

And that’s wrong.

The U.S. government is on a secrecy binge. Itoverclassifiesmoreinformationthanever. And we learn, again and again, that our government regularly classifies things not because they need to be secret, but because their release would be embarrassing.

Knowing how the government spies on us is important. Not only because so much of it is illegal — or, to be as charitable as possible, based on novel interpretations of the law — but because we have a right to know. Democracy requires an informed citizenry in order to function properly, andtransparency and accountability are essential parts of that. That means knowing what our government is doing to us, in our name. That means knowing that the government is operating within the constraints of the law. Otherwise, we’re living in a police state.

We need whistle-blowers.

Leaking information without getting caught is difficult. It’s almost impossible to maintain privacy in the Internet Age. The WikiLeaks platform seems to have been secure — Bradley Manning was caught not because of a technological flaw, but because someone he trusted betrayed him — but the U.S. government seems to have successfully destroyed it as a platform. None of the spin-offs have risen to become viable yet. The New Yorker recently unveiled its Strongboxplatform forleaking material, which is still new but looks good. This link contains the best advice on how to leak information to the press via phone, email, or the post office. The National Whistleblowers Center has a page on national-security whistle-blowers and their rights.

Leaking information is also very dangerous. The Obama Administration has embarked on a waronwhistle-blowers, pursuing them — both legally and through intimidation — further than any previous administration has done. Mark Klein, Thomas Drake, and William Binney have all been persecuted for exposing technical details of our surveillance state. Bradley Manning has been treated cruelly and inhumanly — and possibly tortured — for his more-indiscriminate leaking of State Department secrets.

The Obama Administration’s actions against the Associated Press, its persecution of Julian Assange, and its unprecedented prosecution of Manning on charges of “aiding the enemy” demonstrate how far it’s willing to go to intimidate whistle-blowers — as well as the journalists who talk to them.

But whistle-blowing is vital, even more broadly than in government spying. It’s necessary for good government, and to protect us from abuse of power.

We need details on the full extent of the FBI’s spying capabilities. We don’t know what information it routinely collects on American citizens, what extra information it collects on those on various watch lists, and what legal justifications it invokes for its actions. We don’t know its plans for future data collection. We don’t know what scandals and illegal actions — either past or present — are currently being covered up.

We also need information about what data the NSA gathers, either domestically or internationally. We don’t know how much it collects surreptitiously, and how much it relies on arrangements with various companies. We don’t know how much it uses password cracking to get at encrypted data, and how much it exploits existing system vulnerabilities. We don’t know whether it deliberately inserts backdoors into systems it wants to monitor, either with or without the permission of the communications-system vendors.

And we need details about the sorts of analysis the organizations perform. We don’t know what they quickly cull at the point of collection, and what they store for later analysis — and how long they store it. We don’t know what sort of database profiling they do, how extensive their CCTV and surveillance-drone analysis is, how much they perform behavioral analysis, or how extensively they trace friends of people on their watch lists.

We don’t know how big the U.S. surveillance apparatus is today, either in terms of money and people or in terms of how many people are monitored or how much data is collected. Modern technology makes it possible to monitor vastly more people — yesterday’s NSA revelations demonstrate that they could easily surveil everyone — than could ever be done manually.

Whistle-blowing is the moral response to immoral activity by those in power. What’s important here are government programs and methods, not data about individuals. I understand I am asking for people to engage in illegal and dangerous behavior. Do it carefully and do it safely, but — and I am talking directly to you, person working on one of these secret and probably illegal programs — do it.

If you see something, say something. There are many people in the U.S. that will appreciate and admire you.

For the rest of us, we can help by protesting this war on whistle-blowers. We need to force our politicians not to punish them — to investigate the abuses and not the messengers — and to ensure that those unjustly persecuted can obtain redress.

Our government is putting its own self-interest ahead of the interests of the country. That needs to change.

EDITED TO ADD (6/10): It’s not just phone records. Anothersecretprogram, PRISM, gave the NSA access to e-mails and private messages at Google, Facebook, Yahoo!, Skype, AOL, and others. And in a separate leak, we now know about the Boundless Informant NSA data mining system.

The leaker for at least some of this is Edward Snowden. I consider him an American hero.

EFF has a great timeline of NSA spying. And this and this contain some excellent speculation about what PRISM could be.

Someone needs to write an essay parsing all of the precisely worded denials. Apple has never heard the word “PRISM,” but could have known of the program under a different name. Google maintained that there is no government “back door,” but left open the possibility that the data could have been just handed over. Obama said that the government isn’t “listening to your telephone calls,” ignoring 1) the meta-data, 2) the fact that computers could be doing all of the listening, and 3) that text-to-speech results in phone calls being read and not listened to. And so on and on and on.

I’m sure there are lots more things out there that should be read. Please include the links in comments. Not only essays I would agree with; intelligent opinions from the other sides are just as important.

Liberty Stickers

Disclaimer

https://ephraiyim.wordpress.com contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available to our readers under the provisions of "fair use" in an effort to advance a better understanding of political, economic and social issues. The material on this site is distributed without profit whose expres use is for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material for purposes other than "fair use" you must request permission from the copyright owner.